The forty-four-year-old Venetian was a prisoner. His city-state, the capital of European trade and commerce, had drafted him to fight rival Genoa, where he had been captured and imprisoned. Now he shared a cell with one Rustigielo, a romance writer. As days passed and the two men exchanged stories, Rustigielo realized his next book would be non-fiction—the biography of his comrade.

Published in 1300, The Travels of Marco Polo introduced east to west, forever changing the face of world trade.

Marco Polo was six years old when his father Nicolo, a traveling merchant, left home. When he returned a decade later, Nicolo brought back to Venice exotic cloths and rare gems, new maps—and a mandate from Kublai Khan, ruler of the Mongols. Polo was to return to modern-day Beijing, capital of the Khan’s empire, where he had been one of the first western visitors. “Undismayed by perils and difficulties,” Rustigielo recounted, the teenage Marco decided to travel with him.

Father and son traversed Armenia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, almost six thousand miles en route to China. They met the Caspian Sea and Pamir Mountains, the Persian Gulf and the Gobi Desert, “so long that it would take a year to go from end to end; and at the narrowest point it takes a month to cross it,” said Polo. Indeed, three and a half years passed before the Venetians reached Kublai Khan’s summer residence in May 1275. There the Great Khan appeared and “they knelt before him and made obeisance with the utmost humility,” wrote Rustigielo. Father and son were ordered to remain in China no less than seventeen years.

Affable if anxious, the Polos served Kublai as subjects and soldiers, ambassadors and administrators, translators and traders. Only when the Great Khan reached his late seventies could the Polos leave, and then only after escorting a Mongol princess across the country. Ensuring safe transport was a golden tablet, one foot long, three inches wide, commanding immediate death to anyone who refused them food, lodging, horses, or soldiers. Again, the one-way trip took almost four years and the father and son arrived home in the winter of 1295. Marco, forty-one years old, briefly entertained neighbors by dressing in the clothes of a Chinese peasant. Only imprisonment saved him from obscurity.

Widely published, immediately translated, The Travels of Marco Polo was a bestseller in the age before mass printing. Other Europeans had reached China before the Polos, but none had traveled so far, stayed as long, or documented so much. Marco’s tale detailed the geography of Asia, as well as its diverse political, military, and economic institutions, its sexual and religious customs, its inventions, and its agriculture.

Almost unheard of in Christendom were such novelties as paper currency and a national postal service, coal to heat and cook and asbestos to guard clothes and homes from fire. Canals linked major cities and markets, which traded on credit. Not only were the Chinese clever, they were rich: common people dressed in silk and ate from porcelain. Meanwhile, Kublai Khan’s summer palace, said his visitor, bore walls of gold and silver with seating for six thousand.

Critics attacked the Venetian as a fabricator and fraud, nicknaming his book “The Million” for the supposed number of its lies. For centuries, however, other travelers and traders took much of the guide as gospel. Prince Henry the Navigator and Christopher Columbus, who owned and annotated their own copies of The Travels, were only the most famous of Marco Polo’s followers.

In time, this husband, father, wealthy merchant, influential Venetian, and former prisoner Marco Polo died in January 1324, at the age of sixty-nine. On his deathbed, lore holds, he was offered a chance to recant any mistruths in his famous life story.

“I have only told the half of what I saw,” he said.